Review: The Queen and the Cure

The Queen and the Cure by Amy Harmon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“The very best things in life are born of difficulty. Whatever comes too easily is easily abandoned.”


Amy Harmon never ceases to amaze me. She is able to traverse multiple genres and somehow pulls it off flawlessly. I know each time I pick up one of her books I am going to love it. In the second installment of The Bird and the Sword Chronicles, we follow King Tiras brother Kjell. He's the bastard son of the king and lacks all of the finesse and regality that Tiras possesses. He's more comfortable leading the Kings army, ridding the kingdom of the last of the Volgar. He's also one of the gifted, something he has always denied but has recently accepted. During his travels he finds Sasha, broken and bleeding, driven out by her own community for the gift she was born with. Sasha is able to catch glimpses of the future, but has no ability to direct it and must piece together what she is seeing to make sense of it. Sasha has no memory of who she is or where she came from. Almost immediately upon rescuing her, she's determined to become Kjell's but he's insistent that he doesn't want that, or her. Their journey of finding our what's in Sasha's past will also lead Kjell to the past he didn't know he was missing.

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Review: Fury

Fury by Cat Porter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"She'd lived. Oh, how she'd lived. She hadn't allowed the brutal past to define or mar her. She'd become what she'd chosen, her own design."



I was given an ARC copy of Fury and I adored it!! I put off reading it because I don't have a kindle anymore, and reading on my phone isn't easy but I wish I hadn't waited! I couldn't put it down. My phone and I just moved all over the house, outside, in the car until I couldn't hold my eyes open any longer. Fury was a sort of brutal, raw, and unspoken story, but the very real story of two young adults meeting at the worst moments of their lives but forging an unbreakable bond of survival. I was invested from page one, but the last quarter of the book ripped my heart out. I wanted so much for these two to find their happily ever after, but their world is a gruesome one and things don't usually work out that way. The end was bittersweet, sadness over so much lost time, the happiness of finding one another again, and the unknown of whether they had it in them to make it work after all. This was my first of Cat Porter's books, but definitely not my last.

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Review: Cold Reign

Cold Reign by Faith Hunter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“There is no going back. There is no revival of our humans. There is no erasure of our horrors. No healing except of time and she is a vengeful mistress, leaving scars that are forever. But there also is no proof of foreknowledge, only of twenty-twenty hindsight. You guessed. You did not know. Knowing is only for God.”

I loved Edmund for those words! Eli was struggling in that moment, and when no one else knew what to say he said it perfectly. Jane has transformed so much as a person through this series, and learning to love and trust her new found family is a major part of that growth. Her relationship with Bruiser is as amazing as I hoped it would be, and I can't wait to see what the future has in store for those two.

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Review: The Serpent King

The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Wanting to believe something is powerful”

“If you're going to live, you might as well do painful, brave, and beautiful things.”

“Nothing makes you feel more naked than someone identifying a desire you never knew you possessed.”

I found The Serpent King through the Goodreads Choice Awards and it's been on my to-read shelf a few months. The description seems a little bizarre so I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed each of the characters. The book unfolds from the three main characters alternating point of view during their senior year of high school together. Though they are all the outcasts, they couldn't be more different than one another and yet still such great friends. Dill Early is the son of the shamed snake handling preacher turned jailed pedophile, and he is literally paying for the sins of his father. He and his mother barely make ends meet, and she is just as fanatical as her husband. He's in love with Lydia, the second character who actually comes from a good family, but has dreams of escaping their backwoods Tennessee town. Lydia is a fashion blogger with an eclectic sense of style and a snarky attitude to match. Their friend Travis is a very large, introverted guy who prefers living in the fantasy world of his favorite books to his reality. His father is an asshole who drinks too much and doesn't shy away from getting physical with his wife and son. Each of them is dealing with their own stories, histories, and problems but with each other, they attempt to work them out. Unfortunately, it's not all sparkles and rainbows and their place in the small town tragedy will forever alter their course through life.


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Review: Behind Closed Doors

Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“I can’t help thinking it’s a shame he’s such a sadistic bastard, because he has wonderful manners.”

“The door opens and he stands in the doorway, my handsome, psychopathic husband.”

I have seen Behind Closed Doors discussed several times in different groups and decided to give it a try. I seriously couldn't put it down until I finished it. It's pretty similar to Gone Girl, just less twisted. It's not so much the surprise at how things happened, or how they played out but the horrible reality of it all that makes you want to get to the end. There isn't a lot of suspense because you know pretty early exactly what's going on, but each page introduces a new horror or the next step towards the end.

Grace and Jack are the ideal couple. They're the beautiful people with everything you could hope to one day have, and everything about them is perfection. Behind closed doors, things are anything but perfect though they will do anything to keep their secrets.

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